A system and method for handling a variety of media streams are disclosed. More particularly, a system and method are disclosed that can provide enterprise-wide routing and, preferably, reporting for a variety of incoming media streams.
Telephone call centers are known in the art. A call center is used in allocating telephone calls received from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to be processed by a plurality of call handling personnel or agents. Call centers are used to route telephone calls requiring specific servicesxe2x80x94such as information in a particular language or information about a productxe2x80x94to an agent capable of providing these services. Calls are routed to a particular agent by comparing the services required by the call, determined by, for example, the originating call information, the number called, menu selections made by the caller, and the priority of the call, with the resources available to process the call at the call center, such as personnel, and the skill sets associated with those personnel.
As calls arrive at the call center, computerized call center equipment routes incoming calls of a particular call type, that is, those calls that require identical services, in queues and allocates these calls to appropriate agents, who have the skill set necessary to process these calls in the queues. As will be appreciated, an agent may be assigned to more than one queue.
The calls that are processed by the call center are also tracked by call center equipment. This tracking provides detailed reporting statistics on the disposition of each call received by the call center.
The ability to process calls by a call center is limited by the number of agents that can be accommodated by the call center equipment. Moreover, the skill sets of the call personnel are often insufficient to satisfactorily dispose of all the calls received by the call center. For instance, a call received by a call center designed to attend to calls regarding catalogue sales would have difficulty in attending to a matter that is more appropriately handled by a company""s legal department. Furthermore, as will be appreciated, the cost of providing the equipment and personnel to handle all calls that may be directed to an enterprise (e.g., a company) is not economically feasible with call center technology.
Further, a call center attends only to voice telephone calls from the PSTN. However, businesses receive more than just voice calls directed to the business in general. These other media streams, including for example, voice over IP, faxes, electronic mail (xe2x80x9ce-mailxe2x80x9d), web forms and video, are not processed in a formalized manner but rather on an ad hoc basis. Furthermore, the processing of these other media streams, due to the ad hoc nature of their processing, does not provide the same statistical processing information that enables a business to analyse and improve its response to customer inquiries. The current ad hoc methods and systems for attending to media streams, other than conventional telephone calls, currently require management control over numerous disparate systems. Moreover, these disparate systems do not provide a business with a unified interactive user interface.
Accordingly, it is desired to provide a method and system that can provide enterprise-wide routing and reporting upon a plurality of media streams that addresses these shortcomings of known call centers.
A workflow manager (also referred to herein as a media response system) monitors all media streams incoming to an enterprise, such as voice calls, e-mail, and fax. Through analysis of an incoming media stream, the manager develops attribute data for the stream. Based on the attribute data, the manager queries other systems in the enterprise for further information which will include candidate resources to handle the incoming stream. Based on the replies, the incoming stream is routed to a selected resource.
According to one aspect of the invention, there is provided a method for routing an incoming media stream comprising: a) receiving a media stream comprised of one of a plurality of media stream types directed to an enterprise; b) determining attribute data characteristic of said media stream from said media stream; c) based on said attribute data, requesting information from databases available in said enterprise; and d) based on responses to said information requesting step, routing said incoming media stream to a resource destination address associated with said enterprise.
The invention also provides a system and computer program product to effect this method.